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LIVE 2025
The 11th Workshop on Live Programming

The 11th Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE 2025) will take place online as an independent event.

Key dates
Submission deadline: July 21, 2025 / Notification: August 30, 2025 / Workshop date: October 4-5, 2025
Format: online
Registration details forthcoming.

Where UX meets PL

Programming is cognitively demanding, and too difficult. LIVE is a workshop exploring new user interfaces that improve the immediacy, usability, and learnability of programming. Whereas PL research traditionally focuses on programs, LIVE focuses more on the activity of programming.

Themes

Programmers don't materialise programs out of thin air, but construct them out of existing programs. Embracing this insight leads to a different focus at LIVE compared to traditional PL conferences. Here are some of the qualities that we care about:

Live. Live programming systems give the programmer immediate feedback on the output of a program as it is being edited, replacing the edit-compile-debug cycle with a fluid programming experience. Liveness can also mean providing feedback about how the static meaning of the program is changing, such as its type.
Structured. A program is highly structured and meaningful to the programmer, even in traditionally invalid states. “Structure-aware” programming environments understand and preserve that structure, and allow operations at the level of the structure, rather than at the level of raw text.
Tangible. In the traditional view of programs, execution takes place behind the scenes, and leaves little record of what happened. We are interested in programming systems that make execution transparent, tangible and explorable.
Concrete. People find it easier to start with concrete examples and generalise afterwards. Programming tools tailored to people will support this mode of working.

The majority of LIVE submissions are demonstrations of novel programming systems. Technical papers, insightful and clearly articulated experience reports, theoretical papers that propose and verify generalized principles, literature reviews, and position papers are also welcome.

Our goal is to provide a supportive venue where early-stage work receives constructive criticism. Whether graduate students or tenured faculty, researchers need a forum to discuss new ideas and get helpful feedback from their peers.

Call for submissions

Submit

The LIVE 2025 workshop invites submissions of ideas for improving the immediacy, usability, and learnability of programming. Live programming gives the programmer immediate feedback on the behavior of a program as it is edited, replacing the edit-compile-debug cycle with a fluid programming experience. The best-known example of live programming is the spreadsheet, but there are many others.

Submission Guidelines

LIVE welcomes demonstrations of novel programming systems, experience reports, literature reviews, demos of historic systems, and position papers. Topics of interest include:

  • live programming environments
  • visual programming
  • structure-aware editors
  • advances in REPLs, notebooks, and playgrounds
  • programming with typed holes, interactive programming
  • programming by example/demonstration
  • bidirectional programming
  • debugging and execution visualization techniques
  • language learning environments
  • extending applications with programmatic features
  • alternative language semantics or paradigms in support of the above
  • frameworks for characterising technical or experiential properties of live programming

LIVE provides a forum where early-stage work will receive constructive criticism. Submissions may be short papers, web essays with embedded videos, or demo videos. A written 250 word abstract is required for all submissions. Videos should be up to 20 minutes long, and papers up to 6 pages long. Use concrete examples to explain your ideas.

We require that all submissions of novel programming systems respond to three questions on the submission form:

  1. The headline: What did you discover that other researchers should know about?
  2. Building on the past: What previous systems are similar to yours, in their goals or their methods? How does your system differ?
  3. Keeping a critical eye: Where are the limits of your system? What unsolved problems lie ahead?

LIVE encourages submissions from both inside and outside of academia. We will provide resources to help guide submitters of all types, including drop-in office hours. Please see https://liveprog.org/#resources for details as we post them, and email live-organizers@googlegroups.comwith any questions.

LIVE 2025 will follow an online format on the weekend of October 4–5, mixing pre-recorded videos and live discussion.

Submissions must be made at https://live25.hotcrp.com/paper/new and are due on Monday July 21, 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by Saturday August 30, 2025.

Resources for Submitters

We want to help you submit your best work to LIVE. Here are some resources that may help:

  • The FAQ (right below this section)
  • We plan to host "office hours" for informal discussion of LIVE & submissions in progress, likely from May into July. Sign up for our mailing list to make sure you get the announcement.
  • Please email live-organizers@googlegroups.com with any questions. This certainly includes logistics questions, but more broadly, we would be happy to help you think through how (& whether) to submit to LIVE.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for Submitters

Here are some tips about submitting to LIVE, especially for those who are less familiar with academic workshops:

Why should I submit to LIVE?

LIVE is a community of researchers, developers, and creative people. We get together to share ideas about making programming better through liveness. Submitting work to LIVE makes it part of this conversation.

Academic researchers often use LIVE as a place to develop early stage ideas. Those from outside the academy have found LIVE to be an accessible way to connect with the scholarly community and get in-depth feedback on their work from a new perspective. (Several have even used LIVE as a stepping-stone to full-time work in academia.)

Many people appreciate the deadline and community of a workshop as a way to motivate work on a project. Being forced to explain your ideas to others can be a helpful way to figure out what your ideas are!

What does a submission need to have (and why)?

A LIVE submission is substantial documentation of your work and ideas – not just an abstract (as you may be used to from industry conferences).

Your submission will be reviewed by our program committee. They will provide you with written feedback, and based on their reviews we will select the program for the workshop. This makes for a good guideline on what makes a submission complete – is it fully-formed enough for reviewers to give you helpful feedback? We encourage you to submit works in progress, as long as they meet that threshold.

The majority of LIVE submissions are demonstrations of novel programming systems. Other types of work are also welcome, including technical papers, experience reports, theoretical papers, literature reviews, and position papers.

LIVE submissions will only be shown to the program committee. We do not publish them publicly.

Do I need to submit a fancy academic-formatted paper?

No! We encourage submissions in various formats. Submissions may be short papers, web essays with embedded videos, or demo videos. A written 250 word abstract is required for all submissions. Videos should be up to 20 minutes long, and papers up to 6 pages long.

How does a submission to LIVE differ from a blog post / industry talk / etc.?

LIVE is a scholarly workshop. Scholarly work differs from most of what you'll find on Hacker News in a few important ways:

  • Academic work is analytical and critical: A blog post about a new project plays a largely promotional role. There's room for promotion in a LIVE submission – it's appropriate to clearly and unapologetically communicate what you think your work has to offer. But submitting to LIVE is an opportunity to push further than that in a few directions. For one, it’s an opportunity to look beyond the thing you made and to try to articulate broader lessons. What patterns can you extract from your work? What future possibilities does it suggest? Secondly, submitting to LIVE is an opportunity to think critically about your work. What are its limits? What unsolved problems stand in the way of its potential? This kind of critical analysis doesn’t just defuse potential critics. It’s part of a productive research process, and will help seed fruitful conversation at the workshop.
  • Academic work builds on and makes reference to previous work: At this point, people have been making novel programming systems for over sixty years. That doesn't mean there aren't bold new paths to explore. But to avoid unwittingly retreading the same ground, we need to learn from the past. Ideally, this isn't just a matter of academic etiquette, but is a valuable part of your research process. Your work will be stronger if it explains the inspirations it draws upon and thoughtfully articulates how it differs.

If you'd like further guidance, please get in touch with the workshop organizers: live-organizers@googlegroups.com.

How does review work?

You will receive at least three in-depth reviews of your work from members of the program committee. These reviews will provide you feedback on your work, and will also be used to select which papers to accept. Based on past years, we anticipate accepting 50-90% of submissions. Submissions are due by July 7, and reviews will be released on August 16.

What will I need to do if my work is accepted?

In 2025, LIVE will be hosted as a synchronous online workshop. Detailed plans for the event are TBA, but we expect that presenters will be asked to pre-record a presentation video and to be available for live Q&A during the workshop.

What are some examples of past submissions?

Work submitted to LIVE comes in different shapes and sizes. Here are a few examples, shared with permission of the authors:

  • At LIVE 2018, Geoffrey Litt presented Margin Notes. His original submission was a web essay.
  • At LIVE 2023, Mary Rose Cook presented Lude. Her original submission was a video.
  • At LIVE 2018, Josh Horowitz presented PANE. His original submission was a web essay.

To see the full range of successful LIVE submissions, check out the topics & presentation recordings from previous years.

What is the LIVE community like?

The LIVE community spans academic and independent researchers, industry programmers, artists, musicians, and all kinds of creative people. We live under an academic umbrella and support academic values, but are intentionally open to creative input from everywhere.